Well, there is one major thing to consider, and that is how much you want the show or film's basis on actual science, even if it can only by hypothetical or theoretical.

The current primary hypothetical method of FTL travel would be the warp drive as theorized by Alcubierre, which most of us have probably already heard of, though I suspect that an intensive enough search might bring up a few cases where extra-terrestrial beings give clues as to the method of propulsion of their alien ships, as claimed by witnesses, abuctdees, and contactees.

I would image that while warping space, it would probably be possible to see directly ahead and behind, but all other directions would be distorted from the warping of space, so unless sensors could be calibrated to compensate for the distortions, it would probably be difficult to determine what is outside of the warp field, aside from what has already been chartered and mapped.

Well, there is a possible script-based rationale for the jump being instantaneous when it isn't supposed to be.

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Well, there's a point in the story where the crew's definitely flying blind and really not in control, yeah. A lot of posts are unmanned, so there's a high degree of automation involved (in an earlier draft of the script, Polaris itself was talked about as an entity with its own intelligence, though never addressed as an individual by the crew. I dropped that idea, but I think one line remains where one officer reports to another, in answer to a question about ship's status, "Sir, the ship doesn't know"). There's a later point in the story where we see that some time passes in the normal universe between the ship leaving a place and appearing elsewhere, which at least suggests that time might pass for them as well.

I don't want dialogue or technical explanations that are more specific than those in Forbidden Planet or the original Star Trek (or for that matter and much more recently, Moore's Battlestar Galactica).

Finished off most of the hull detailing on the back half of the main fuselage:

And, at long last, WINDOWS!

Note that not all of the windows have been modeled yet.

Something else worth noting is that I froze and optimized a number sub-D objects, which reduced the overall poly count by more than 25,000, even with the addition of the windows and other hull details. Current count stands at a little over 441,000 and my goal is to keep the end result under 500,000.

So, after the last round of modeling updates, I was playing around with different rendering techniques and some texturing ideas, just because I can't resist doing that. I was using my standard panel map hull texture and it dawned on me, now that the windows are in place, that the dense overlapping panel look is all wrong for the scale of this ship. I got curious what it would look like if I just shaded the modeled hull sections with some slight variation from one to the next. I wound up using 4 different materials applied more or less randomly, each with its own procedural noise map set to a unique phase. This was the result:

I haven't textured every individual hull section yet because it takes a fair amount of work, and of course there are no markings or other colors, but I think the basic look works pretty darn well. I'm not doing the actual texturing for the model but I will be doing some paintovers to show what the texturing will look like, and this is just some experimentation to work that out. The final version would have some more localized wear and tear, maybe some finer and subtler panel lines, and more detail in general.

This lends itself to a feeling of functionality that I think "random panels" don't portray. I always wonder why anyone would build something that way also. I like the panels to appear as though if you removed them, there would be some logic underlying them to why they are cut to that particular shape and attached in that particular manner.

This looks much more believable to my eye. I can't wait to see the whole thing given this treatment.

I much prefer this to the kitchen floor tile look of most spaceship textures. What's the point in making a ship out of plates 4 feet across?

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I just don't see the point in rendering a model so that the planes/polys it is actually made up of are smoothed out of existence, only to then apply a texture to make that now smooth surface look like it's made out of individual polygonal plates anyway. WTF? Seems that the more realistic approach to "plating" a model, would be by subtly varying the materials properties of individual polys, (or groups of polys) to accentuate them, rather than trying to hide them.

With rare exceptions, modeled polygons don't look like physical plates unless you go to the considerable extra effort of modeling seams between them, rivets or other visual cues that are much more easily accomplished with textures. Even if you're just doing some subtle shading differences, it's usually easier to do it with textures. On Polaris for example, I don't think there's a single panel line that just happened to fall along an existing set of edges in the 3D geometry. The only reason I didn't use regular mapped textures is because I already had the modeled panel lines and because UV unwrapping this thing is not gonna be a task for the faint of heart.

Can we see that with the nice dirty metal texture you used at one point on the engine bits?

My only critique on this would be to perhaps try turning down the procedural overlay a bit and/or throw another one on top at a different scale. Right now the 'cloud' shapes are pretty obvious if you know what you're looking at. Other than that I am really digging the look. The gloss looks a bit high (or perhaps the bump/normal is a bit low) on one of the materials, but the overall look is pretty convincing as a "fresh off the assembly line" vessel before painting and the like. Would make perfect sense to me that the shell of the ship would be made of large segments over the top of the nuts and bolts, or that the hull panels would be coated and sealed to no longer be visible as individual plates.

What I'm doing here is just experimenting with the overall look, I'm not actually texturing the model. This is in preparation for some paintovers I plan to do as a guide to the people who will be doing the texturing.

I agree the gloss is probably a bit high, especially for animation. What looks good in stills often winds up to be overly shiny and distracting in motion. Also, the materials used to accomplish that effect come with some pretty high rendering overhead and glossy reflections may not be used at all in the end product, especially since they don't add much in a realistic space environment. That work will be done in Lightwave, which I assume has similar capabilities but probably at similar cost in render time.